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The Home And Family
The 50 Biggest Changes In The Last 50 Years
August/September 2004 | Volume 55, Issue 4
With American Heritage approaching its fiftieth birthday in December 2004, we’ve asked five prominent historians and cultural commentators to each pick 10 leading developments in American life during the last half-century. In this issue Paul Berman, a contributing editor to The New Republic and the author of Terror and Liberalism , published by W. W. Norton & Company, selects the 10 biggest changes in the American home and family life. In other issues this year our authorities offer their choices of the halfcentury’s biggest transformations in politics, popular culture, business, and innovation and technology.
What have been the 10 greatest changes in American home and family life during the last half-century? I think the first of these changes has turned out to be the deepest of all—the change that set into motion all the other changes, the prime mover. This was, oddly enough, the change mandated by the Supreme Court in its 1954 ruling on . . .
The Brown decision ordered the end of racial segregation in the public schools, on the ground that racial segregation means racial hierarchy, and government-sanctioned racial hierarchy runs counter to the democratic spirit of the Constitution.
You may ask, What has this got to do with families and the home? Everything, oh, everything, in my view. But in order to explain why I think so, I must defer to one of the greatest authorities on family life who ever lived—Honoré de Balzac. In the series of novels and novellas he called The Human Comedy , Balzac catalogued the changes that had overtaken French family life during his own time, the early nineteenth century. These changes were vast. And in Balzac’s judgment, they were horrendous. Daughters became contemptuous of their fathers ( Le Père Goriot ). Sons were careless of their family’s hard-earned wealth (ibid.). Homosexuals inflicted crime on the rest of society (ibid.). Cousins were monstrous ( Cousin Bette ). Husbands were indifferent to the material wealth of their own families (ibid.). Wives were unfaithful (practically the entire Human Comedy ). And so on. And what was the ultimate source of these many dismaying changes, the moral catastrophe of French family life?
Balzac thought he knew. The ultimate source of the many disasters was the beheading of King Louis XVI m 1793. Until that moment family life in France, as Balzac imagined it, had floated serenely through the waters of a well-ordered society. Fathers and husbands ruled with a firm, just, and loving hand. Wives were obedient, pious, helpful, and ardent. Children loved and obeyed their parents. Cousins were un-monstrous. All society followed the pleasing customs of fidelity and morality, and these excellent customs were aromatized by a delicious feeling of passionate love in correct and Churchsanctioned ways. The social classes upheld the principles of mutual responsibility and honor. And all this, the splendid orderliness of a wellorganized society, rested on a single foundation, which was the principle of duly-constituted, legitimate authority. This was the principle of social rank and hierarchy. It was the principle of nobility and of upper nobility—the principle, finally, of monarchy.
Alas! In 1793 the great diabolical crime was committed. The guillotine blade descended, the king’s head was severed from his body, and society was likewise severed from its legitimate governing principle. All hell thereupon broke loose, in Balzac’s view. The sacred bonds of family life disintegrated. Crime triumphed over duty. And Balzac, wide-eyed in astonishment, his curly hair standing on end at the mere thought of how dreadful were the scenes around him, dipped his pen into the inkwell and set out to record the scandalous consequences.
Balzac’s estimation of the French Revolution and its results is not universally shared. Some people have pointed out that monarchy had its shortcomings, feudalism was not everything it was cracked up to be, the Rights of Man was good, and the French Revolution was, all in all, a worthy project. This has always been my own judgment on French history. I take a sans-culotteish view of these things. It was a pity about the king and his head. But the ancien régime had to go. Still, I grant that Balzac did notice something important. He correctly understood that the most intimate details of family life rest in mysterious ways on the largest and most public of political principles. He noticed that a change in the foundation of political principles may well wreak considerable changes in the intimate regions of family life.
But enough about the France of long ago. What about America? In our country we never did have much of a feudal past, except here and there, ages ago. Nor was our Revolution anything like the one in France. Nor have we ever had a king of our own. We do have Presidents. But we have never had to behead any of them, though the temptation to do so has sometimes been great. Yet we did in the past have a firmly mandated and legally binding principle of social authority, which somehow or another dominated every phase of social life. This was the principle of racial hierarchy, a principle that descended into modern American life from the slavery of yore, the principle that put white people at the top and black people at the bottom.